Facebook’s emotions study has created a privacy furore, but it also provides a warning about whom we sit next to at work.

Last week the world discovered that the social network manipulated the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users to see what effect the changes would have on their emotions.

Facebook has copped some flak and a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission by a US privacy group.

The New York Times writes that at the time of the emotion study, the company’s data policy did not tell users that their personal information could be used for research purposes.

I’m tempted to delete my Facebook account in protest.

But the study also tells us something about just how catching emotions are. For a week in 2012 Facebook changed the number of positive and negative posts that users saw in their feeds to see how that affected the emotional tone of the posts they made afterward. The research, published in an academic journal last week, found that people who were exposed to more negative material went on to write slightly more negative posts, and vice versa.

If our emotions and then output can be affected by posts that we read on social media, imagine how we are affected by miserable or optimistic colleagues in the flesh.

This is something that Melbourne Business School professor Jill Klein touches on when she and her holocaust-survivor father teach executives about coping with work stress.

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Klein argues that having friends is important if you want to cope with the inevitable challenges at work. “Just the act of sharing your thoughts and feelings about an adverse event is actually very healthy," she says. “It allows for positive emotions and it’s critical for reducing stress during difficult times." But she agrees that it helps to surround yourself with positive types.

Her father, Gene Klein, found this out when he was trying to survive in Auschwitz and Nazi labour camps as a teenager. He deliberately sought out young people like himself who still believed (rationally or not) that there would be a life after the horror they were enduring, Jill Klein says.

We are a world away from concentration camps, but researchers have discovered that at work negative emotions are twice as contagious as positive ones, although recovery is also twice as fast. The researchers also found happier workers are 12 per cent more productive, while unhappier ones are 10 per cent less productive.

We may have a moral obligation to be there for friends and colleagues with a genuine problem, but there’s a hidden cost to hanging out with a permanent grouch.

Next time you choose a hot desk or ask a colleague out to lunch, it would pay to look for someone with a smile on their face.